Liberty Machine Works trading card
A trading card of F.M. Weiler’s Liberty Machine Works, the sole manufacturers of the Liberty Printing Press, from the collection of Jonathan Bulkley. It was printed by A.V. Haight of Haight & Dudley, Poughkeepsie, New York, on a “new style noiseless Liberty job press no. 9,211”. According to David Wakefield, this work is shown in Haight & Dudley’s Specimens of Printing from 1888. From around 1887, Liberty Machine Works dropped the “F.M. Weiler’s” part from their name and was doing business as Liberty Machine Works. We can hence date this piece of ephemera to circa 1887.
Typefaces used are the following:
• “Bryant Goodwin, President” etc.: probably Italic Gothic, No. 2 (c. 1876) a.k.a. Gothic Italic, see Halbfette Cursiv-Grotesque (c. 1874)
• “Liberty Machine Works”: Mural (1881)
• “Established 1859”: an extended French Clarendon, distinguished by an A with top bar, cf. French Clarendon Extended No. 120
• “Sole manufacturers”, “Printing on new style”, etc.: an unidentified Gothic
• “Liberty Printing Press”: Abbey (1886)
• “54 Frankfort St., New York.”: Mother Hubbard (c. 1885)
2 Comments on “Liberty Machine Works trading card”
Shouldn’t we merge our entry for Kursiv Grotesk with Halbfette Cursiv-Grotesque’s, considering how the same typeface is being described?
Absolutely! I had created that first entry in 2016, for the Kranichfeld invoice. The other one was started in 2020 by Stephen for the American versions of this design, known as Gothic Italic. When Eva contributed this trading card last month, I was able to add a lot of info from Dan’s research which he kindly shared on his Typeoff blog. I changed Gothic Italic to the original name (with the other names added as aliases), but overlooked the fact that we already had another entry. Thanks for spotting the duplicate! The Fonts In Use database is a never-ending work in progress – we make addition, edits, and corrections virtually on a daily basis.